sumptuous pleasures
and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs. Michael followed him,
however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable
spiral of staircase. At one point a door opened. Michael stepped through
it, and the unaccountable man in buttons leapt after him and pinioned
him where he stood. But he only wished to stand; to stand and stare.
He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of
another heaven. But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and
green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in
shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate
plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars still
in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of darkness.
And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen creeping or
motionless, great black masses of men. The tongue of a terrible organ
seemed to shake the very air in the whole void; and through it there
came up to Michael the sound of a tongue more terrible; the dreadful
everlasting voice of man, calling to his gods from the beginning to the
end of the world. Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the
voices were hurled at him.

"No, the pretty things aren't here," said the demi-god in buttons,
caressingly. "The pretty things are downstairs. You come along with me.
There's something that will surprise you downstairs; something you want
very much to see."

Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael made no
attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him meekly enough
down the trail of the serpentine staircase. He had no notion where or at
what level he was. He was still full of the cold splendour of space,
and of what a French writer has brilliantly named the "vertigo of the
infinite," when another door opened, and with a shock indescribable he
found himself on the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the
houses and even the lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy
and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied he had been changed into a
child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as children's do, as
if it were a thing with which something satisfactory could be done.
He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut
themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but
which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair ha